The Design Space of Minds-In-General

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People ask me, "What will
Artificial Intelligences be like? What will they do? Tell us your
amazing story about the future."

And lo, I say unto them, "You have
asked me a trick question."

ATP
synthase is a molecular machine - one of three known occasions when
evolution has invented the freely rotating wheel - which is
essentially the same in animal mitochondria, plant chloroplasts, and
bacteria. ATP synthase has not changed significantly since the rise
of eukaryotic life two billion years ago. It's is something we all
have in common - thanks to the way that evolution strongly conserves
certain genes; once many other genes depend on a gene, a mutation
will tend to break all the dependencies.

Any two AI
designs might be less similar to each other than you are to a
petunia.

Asking
what "AIs" will do is a trick question because it implies
that all AIs form a natural class.
Humans do form a natural class because we all share the same brain
architecture. But when you say "Artificial Intelligence",
you are referring to a vastly larger space
of possibilities
than when you say "human". When people talk about
"AIs" we are really talking about minds-in-general,
or optimization processes in general. Having a word for "AI"
is like having a word for everything that isn't a duck.

Imagine
a map of mind design space... this is one of my standard diagrams...

This
tiny dot belongs to a wider ellipse, the space of transhuman mind
designs - things that might be smarter than us, or much smarter than
us, but which in some sense would still be people as we understand
people.

This transhuman ellipse is within a still wider volume, the space of posthuman
minds, which is everything that a transhuman might grow up into.

And
then the rest of the sphere is the space of minds-in-general,
including possible Artificial Intelligences so odd that they aren't
even posthuman.

But
wait - natural selection designs complex artifacts and selects among
complex strategies. So where is natural selection on this map?

So
this entire map really floats in a still vaster space, the space of
optimization processes. At the bottom of this vaster space, below
even humans, is natural selection as it first began in some tidal
pool: mutate, replicate, and sometimes die, no sex.

Are
there any powerful optimization processes, with strength comparable
to a human civilization or even a self-improving AI, which we would
not recognize as minds? Arguably Marcus Hutter's
AIXI should go in this category: for a mind of infinite power, it's
awfully stupid - poor thing can't even recognize itself in a mirror.
But that is a topic for another time.

My
primary moral is to resist
the temptation to generalize over all of mind design space

If we focus on the bounded subspace of mind design space which contains all those minds whose
makeup can be specified in a trillion bits or less, then every
universal generalization that you make has two to the trillionth
power chances to be falsified.

Conversely, every existential
generalization - "there exists at least one mind such that X"
- has two to the trillionth power chances to be true.

So you want to
resist the temptation to say either that all
minds do something, or that no
minds do something.

The
main reason you could find yourself thinking that you know what a
fully generic mind will (won't) do, is if you put yourself in that mind's
shoes - imagine what you would do in that mind's place - and get back
a generally wrong, anthropomorphic answer. (Albeit that it is true in at least one case, since you are yourself an example.) Or if you imagine a mind
doing something, and then imagining the reasons you
wouldn't do it - so that you imagine that a mind of that type can't
exist, that the ghost in the machine will look over the corresponding
source code and hand it back.

Somewhere in mind design space is at least one mind with almost any kind of logically consistent property you care to imagine.

And this is important because it emphasizes the importance of discussing what happens, lawfully, and why, as a causal result of a mind's particular constituent makeup; somewhere in mind design space is a mind that does it differently.

Of course you could always say that anything which doesn't do it your way, is "by definition" not a mind; after all, it's obviously stupid. I've seen people try that one too.